Recently, a friend of mine who has been divorced for several years asked me if I would transfer her Wedding Video, so she could watch it on a modern playback medium. She felt it was time to give some closure to this part of her life and she wanted to look with fresh eyes and new life experiences back to her wedding day. She was moving to a new place, getting rid of old clothes, massively purging, and getting ready to change careers. She wisely thought that by watching the wedding video she would be able to gain some additional momentum to move forward as she began this next chapter. When she visited me, about two months later I asked her if she watched the movie. “No”, she said. “I’m not ready”. I thought about this for a minute, without attaching any particular meaning or judgement. I remembered all the clients I had worked with over the years who had also been resistant to watch old home movies. The fear of not knowing what is on the reels manifests itself in the cycle of desire to know and confusion about dealing with emotional scares from the people who have hurt us. Lets face it. There is a lot of pain in the past. We push the hurt way down, until something triggers a memory, and that old stuff comes up. We use imagery to play the tapes in our mind. We rewind them in our head. We press play. We feel the hurt. We hit eject. But the stories are still there. But what if those old tapes aren’t right? What if they are just stories we made up to help us cope? What if we had new evidence that we could extract from a time machine that could capture “life in the moment” and when we revisited it, it revealed new information, more details, or allowed us the opportunity to give new meaning because WE are a different person that we were when the moment was recorded? What if this “time machine we call “HOME MOVIES helped us heal from the hurt, let go of our fear, or allowed us to attach new meaning? What if they challenged everything we believed (up until now) and gave us new insight, so we could shift our focus, transform our understanding, and move forward in our life? What if we could forgive fuller, and clean up a mess or misunderstanding with an ex-spouse, family member or friend. We could have a breakthrough – an ah-ha moment that would allow us to become “unstuck”, and live more joyful, authentic and grateful lives. We could heal and we could forgive. THE POWER OF HOME MOVIES… “Images act as shortcuts to our brains, and that is why visuals are so powerful” – Ekaterina Walter This is exactly what happens when you watch a home movie. These films are the most organic form of physical evidence we have. Our body language, posture, eye contact, facial expressions, shyness or tenacity are all captured , frame by frame. We see how the people in the film treat each other. Like magic, we are back in the moment! People are constantly looking for ways to heal from pain and hurt. We make use of various types of therapy, imagery, regression, hypnosis. We try to access memories that have been blocked and even when we do , how do we know those memories accurately recall the way it happened? In my podcast today, Brittany and I discuss how working in the adult contemporary domains can help you have ah-ha’s where you might be getting stuck in the past. A powerful interview you won’t want to miss! http://bit.ly/1p7zWkb